Articles

Tools Are the Medium — Not the Message

By Don Starnes, Director of Photography

Published by Digital Mogul in its Revolving Expert Series

There are many more ways to create and distribute movies these days. When I got started as a filmmaker, there were three formats: 35mm, 16mm and Super-8. Then, of course, there was television (which no one took seriously). Television used videotape to archive things, although we had heard that they had a tape machine with handles on it that you could take outside of a TV station. Son of a gun.

It sounds as though I’m writing this from the Hollywood Retirement Home, but I’m talking 1978 here. Your parents were around then. Except for the abundance of Disco and the scarcity of computers, it wasn’t so different. This is recent history.

What we knew then is that these different formats are actually different media. Certain people making certain kinds of movies for certain audiences used 8mm film. Double the width of the film and another set of people would use it to make another kind of movie for another audience. Double the width again (plus a few millimeters) and another set of people would be involved in another kind of movie. Each set of people had its own (sub)culture, each movie its own purpose, each audience its own needs. Film producers didn’t worry about those things. They thought about story, character, message (and the budget and profit). Which medium (the tools, the culture) to use was obvious to them.

Pity the poor producer today. Now, in addition to thinking about story, character, and message, the producer has to worry about whether, for example, the background of the interview will turn chunky when it is crunched for YouTube. There are so many tools now: tools to acquire data, tools to encode the images and sound, and tools to distribute content (we used to call this “shooting, editing and exhibiting movies”). People are obsessed with media tools. Everybody knows about them. I was shooting a medical show once, an athrectomy that was being narrowcast live to a trade show audience of doctors. As the specialists were inching the steel wire into the large aorta near his heart, the patient, under local anesthesia, a surgeon’s twitch away from possible death, looked up and asked me “How many megapixels is that camera?”

Did you see Titanic for the special effects? Admit it: you did. It wasn’t to find out what happens at the end (spoiler alert: the boat sinks). Movie advertisements often sell the movie based on its production methods. Every studio produces an EPK (Electronic Press Kit, including the “behind the scenes” movie) to explain how a movie was made because the audiences eat it up. There are more film schools in San Francisco than gas stations. We watch for camera salespeople’s press releases like a mouse watches for birds of prey.

In my work, I’ve shot every imaging format except 65mm film (IMAX producers take note: I’m in the Local 600 directory). I’ve seen my work on TV, in movie theaters, on DVD, Blu-rays and on the net. I’ve worked with hundreds of producers and directors. I know the meaning of almost all the acronyms. I shoot tests and do my homework. And I know this: each permutation of the tools is really a medium with its own limits.

Limits are not a bad thing; limits are not limitations. Art is defined by its limits. If you stretch a canvas on a frame that is four feet tall and one foot wide, it is unlikely that you are going to paint a grove of trees on it. You are more likely to start imagining one tall tree or a waterfall. The shape of the canvas, its limits, actually helps create the painting. Similarly, Avatar was not photographed with DSLRs.

If James Cameron had wanted to make a movie with DSLRs, he most likely would have had a tiny crew and would have been thinking of documentary style stories about a few characters, with lots of close ups, probably an indie angst movie (Terminator IV: I Just Want a Better Girlfriend).

I’ve noticed lots of suffering on media productions these days in regard to the tools. It comes from trying to make a movie fit the medium (or fit more than one medium at a time) instead of using the medium that best fits the movie. It usually goes something like this:

Producer: I want to shoot this documentary with a 5D so that we can get in and out fast and be inconspicuous. And I want lots of wide shots to show the environment that these people are in.

Me: Wide shots will turn to noise in 4:2:0.

Producer: Oh. How will that affect the uprez to 2K?

Me: You want to uprez to 2K?

Producer: Yeah. Hey, I need premium festival exposure to get it on HBO.

or:

Director: Can’t we lose the headroom?

Me: Well, then we’d lose his eyebrows in theatrical.

Director: Hmm. Well, how about his herringbone jacket? Can we use that?

Me: Yes, but it will look like carpenter ants are crawling all over him on the web.

or:

Producer: I know that we had talked about shooting 16mm to get that old-school indie look and making a DI for both 2K theatrical and Blu.ray, but I just read about how 4K is taking over and that it is supposed to intercut seamlessly with our 35mm stock footage. Also, my editor just switched from Final Cut X because he got a great deal on a Wintel box running Vegas Pro, and I am thinking of skipping discs and just going to VOD. I also just read about quad copters with the GoPro Black and rumors that GoPro is going to have an HDR firmware upgrade…

…and so on.

I know that everything these days will be distributed to all of the different venues. I know that the technology changes every few days. I know that the stakes are high. I know the stress and the fear. That is why I say calming things to producers and directors. For example:

Director: Oh my god! What are we going to do?

Me: This movie’s really about this intimate relationship, right?

Director: Yeah.

Me: Let’s do what works best for that story. If it is emotionally right, it will work everywhere. Let’s shoot with…

An early cinematographer, the Buddha, wrote that mindfulness (of the limits) was the only way to avoid suffering. Through mindfulness (of the limits of the medium) we attain enlightenment. As best as you can, pick a set of tools, call it a medium, and enjoy its limits. Think about story, character and message. Be an artitst.

Updated from the original article, which was published prophetically in 1996.

Art for Sale: The Co-Production Market at the World Film Festival

By Don Starnes and Connie Kronlokken

Published by Film/Tape World, October 2004

Connie, Don and Jean getting down to brass tacks in the Hyatt bar.

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

We’re on the plane from SFO to Trudeau Airport, en route to the World Film Festival in Montreal. This is our third road trip in four days. We’ve had little sleep: we were up all night hastily printing business cards and half sheet “pitch menu” cards with descriptions of our four feature projects in development. We have 25 kitschy beige tote bags with our URL printed on them, a flax seed grinder and a bottle of aspirin. Don’s foot is throbbing because he sprained it playing with the family on our recent vacation and the battery in our tape player just died, interrupting our remedial French lesson. There is nothing left to prepare: we are simply packets being switched to Montreal.

Don is a successful director of photography, after 20 years of plying the trade. Connie has worked here and there in the movie business. Together we’ve written three feature screenplays for the fun of it, and are working on several others. We’ve been toying with the idea of making films with them. This had been an urgent yet unfocussed notion until Don got a call from Beryl Lusen, whose short film, The Right Gift, Don had photographed. Beryl’s film was selected for competition at the Montreal World Film Festival. Beryl suggested that we pitch our projects at the festival’s co-production market. We would miss the first few days of the market due to prior commitments, but we couldn’t pass it up.

The Marche International du Film, at the Festival des Films du Monde Montreal, was started by Serge Losique 28 years ago. The festival itself has a reputation for showing great works by film artists from around the world. Depending on your perspective, this means either “art house films for cineastes” or “films that will never get a significant theatrical release, especially in the U.S.”

In the last few years, Serge and his festival have been criticized as being out of step with the glitzy upstart Toronto film festival, not to mention the commercial festivals, Cannes, Venice and Sundance. Serge’s response has been essentially: too bad, film is an art, get used to it. This friction has gotten to the point that a few weeks before the festival Telefilm Canada and Sodec (Canadian state funding agencies) threatened to pull a total of C$1 million out of the festival’s funding unless big changes are made (read: Serge resigns).

The market is focused on co-productions. Many countries have state funding for motion picture production. Many of these sign co-production agreements that enable producers from signatory countries to pool funds to make movies. The United States, of course, has little state funding for motion picture projects and does not sign co-production agreements. Still, according to some producers, foreign co-productions can be created in the good old American, back-door way, and that those knowing the ropes can get them done. It’s all a matter of personal interaction, who you know and Yankee gumption.

So here we are, on our first full day as feature film producers. We don’t know too many people. We don’t know the ropes. We have little clue what we’re doing and few ideas of where to get a clue.

Thursday, September 2

We’ve come to pitch. Don knows how to offer shots to directors, but neither of us has had to pitch a feature film to anyone before. During our vacation last week in a remote cabin in Minnesota, we refined our pitches on a manual typewriter and practiced them on our relatives, a hastily convened focus group. We slayed them, of course, but how would these pitches fare with foreign producers?

The festival is headquartered at the Hyatt hotel. The hotel’s bar, where the market’s real work is done, is circular; the market salons are in rooms radiating off the bar. When we arrive at 11:00 a.m. the bar is fairly full of chatting, smoking people with badges on yellow market lanyards. The main salon, in the hotel’s Salon Jeanne-Mance, has several tables covered with promotional materials. Most seem to be for finished films. Perhaps six people are drinking coffee at the salon’s high café tables. In the Videotheque, 20 people, whose average age seemed to be about 50, review films at 36 monitors. Market mailboxes are behind a booth in the salon, personed by two very friendly receptionists who greet us and give us our market materials: the Industry List, the Market Guide, the Project Book, and the fat Festival Guide describing films shown in the festival. We are surprised to find that we do not have mailboxes, but the receptionists quickly offer to create them for us.

Over lattes and croissants in the bar, we rip into the Industry List, looking for producers without films in the market. We stuff the mailboxes with our “pitch menu” cards and some of our Lightly Held Films tote bags, email and call people, requesting meetings and setting up appointments. Then we have a late lunch and go to a festival screening which includes Beryl’s film.

The Imperial theater is packed with dedicated, but not young, cineastes. A festival person introduces Beryl as the maker of the short film, speaking in both French and English.

Beryl graciously introduces Don as the director of photography; the audience applauds enthusiastically (for the DP, no less!).

Back at the market, the bar looks rather empty. We post more cards, unaware that everyone is at a party in the nearby Salon des Arts. We meet Beryl and his lovely wife Tabitha, an artist who makes her own beautiful dresses, at Restaurant Julien, which was quite good (especially the confit de canard) and congratulate him on the warm reception for his film.

Number of pitches today = 0.

Friday, September 3

We talk with several film buyers, directors, writers and producers; several people are trying to create co-productions as we are. All have advice: go to the co-production market at the Rotterdam festival; find wealthy Indians in Silicon Valley who are looking for investments; go to festivals, meet actors, get past their agents and discuss your script with them. Most people at the market seem to be buying or selling finished films.

In the men’s room, Don meets Jean, an elegant, old school Quebecois producer. He agrees to hear our pitch and joins us at a table. We pitch our World War II project, which takes place in Southern California. Jean says it sounds great, but that if he produced it in Canada, he wouldn’t be able to release it in America as we would like because American distributors don’t want Canadian films. “Do you have a thriller?” he asks. We mention “Surrender,” our heist picture, our ace in the hole, which we have for just such requests. We agree to send a treatment and begin to pitch another project. “Let’s change the subject to politics,” Jean interrupts. “What do you think of Bush?”

Number of pitches today = 1.

Saturday, September 4

We speak with an actors, screenwriters, a musician, a few film buyers and a lot of directors. We talk with few producers.

We meet with Philippa, an unpretentious world citizen who works for an Israeli company that specializes in co-production. She says co-productions with France or Germany are the easiest. We asked about Japan and Switzerland, countries that are apropos to some of our projects: Japanese co-production is difficult and the Swiss look to the Germans for co-production funding. The Canadians see the United States film industry as the big bad brother. “You must like the people who you produce with,” she says. “There is a saying in Israel, ‘they’re going to be in your veins.’” She glances at our “pitch menu” card, but as none of our films is set in Israel, she politely passed on our projects.

At the evening’s party at the Salon de Arts, we meet a producer from a Montreal company that funds films and also farms, among other things. He had just come back from putting together a deal for slaughterhouse in Romania. We discussed farming. He agrees to read a treatment for “Surrender”.

Today’s pitches = 0.

Sunday, September 5

Paul Cox, a provisionally Australian auteur, meets us for coffee, dressed as we were, in black. Paul, whose film “Vincent” means a lot to us, makes humanist films of the sort we are trying to make. He has a world weary and relaxed look, yet his deep, intense eyes brighten humorously in conversation. He pulls no punches when describing the deep illness of film production, the delusions of filmmakers and the illusions of producers. “In America, it gets worse all the time. Films aren’t [just products to be sold like] chicken wings and hamburgers: they have to do with our dreams.”

Cox thinks that Connie and I are going about things the wrong way, that our “pitch menu” card is too complicated, and that the best route is to slowly grow one project you are passionate about. As Americans, we should forget co-production, although it would help if we could “become Canadian”. If we can get something done, he advises, then we’ll have something to show. “As Nijinsky said, you’ll understand me when you see me dance.”

At the buffet lunch, Don sits next to Paul, a Canadian director who looks like Ben Affleck and whose first feature, which was produced in New York, had screened the night before. Paul is already sick of the independent film scene and is anxious to move on to “$60 million features in Los Angeles.” He hates his New York producer and looks forward to an opportunity to get revenge.

We speak with more filmmakers and producers. Some select a project from our “pitch menu” and ask for treatments. Some recommend other people to us. At the Salon de Arts’ oxygen bar, which promotes a local oxygen club by giving people free oxygen samples through tubes in their noses, we talk with an internet film distributor, film buyers, two Russian distributors and an Iranian filmmaker.

Number of pitches today = 0.

Monday, September 6

On our way to the airport, we squeeze in one more meeting with a polite Japanese producer who primarily distributes documentary features but does some production. Don pitches our theatrical documentary, which works well: he asks Don to e-mail him the script as an Acrobat file.

Number of pitches today = 1.

Our cab driver to Trudeau airport, a warm Frenchman, fills us in on more of the local dirt about Serge and his festival. “There are no stars at the festival!” he complains. Then he blushes. “Unless you two are stars!”

On the plane to SFO, we conclude the following:

We think that Serge and his festival are great.

Of the 750 people listed in the Industry List, we counted perhaps 25 producers who seemed to be at the market to create co-productions.

Even at the Montreal market, where we expected small films to be greeted warmly, producers are interested in making money. Is your film idea marketable? What do you bring (besides the script): money? Attached stars? What films have you produced before? Our genre picture was the most popular.

Foreign producers seem more interested in who we were than in hearing a pitch; they preferred to read our half-sheet “pitch menu” card. When they saw something that they were interested in, they most often requested a treatment (1–4 pages) or coverage (about 20–40 pages). Only one producer asked for a script.

The pitch process is a great way to get Spiderman sequels made. It may not be the best way to get movies about people made by first time directors.

Wiser, Don’s foot a bit sorer, we are again packets being switched back home. Don is reminded that producing films is way harder than shooting films! We’re still committed to getting our films produced, but neither of us is quitting our day jobs.

Don Starnes is a director of photography in San Rafael; Connie Kronlokken is a writer. They produce films together as Lightly Held Films.

If You Go To Montreal

Before you go, obtain a list of producers who will be at the market from the festival’s web site and make appointments to meet them at the market.

Never miss the first days of a market: attendance dwindled by perhaps half as the days progressed.

List your projects in the Production Exchange Project Book and your other materials in both English and French. Specify the budget in both U.S. dollars and euros.

Don’t expect color printers in the Internet Café.

It is probably best to stay in the hotel that hosts the festival because everyone else is there and it is easier to establish meetings with people. Put your picture on your card or flyer: it will help people recognize you when you meet.

Watch the films. People love to talk about the films they’ve seen and appreciate it when you’ve seen the films they’ve produced.

Swag probably works: all of our promotional tote bags, which we put out on the promotional tables, disappeared quickly. We saw a few people carrying our bags, which hopefully made us a bit more familiar to people. The best place to get custom printed promotional materials is Ashbury Images in San Francisco.

Monitors and Filmmaking: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Wires

By Don Starnes, Director / Director of Photography

17” LCD: friend or foe?

The difference between making a movie and making a video is that a movie is created in the filmmakers’ minds and a video is created on a monitor.

Viewfinders on cameras have always been an afterthought. Early film cameras didn’t have them at all: the operator simply pointed the lens in the general direction of the action. Later, when rotating mirrored shutters were invented, enabling a reflex viewing system, film camera viewfinders were almost useless: dark, flickering images. You could get a sense of the framing if you were lucky. A camera assistant did the actual focusing (by setting the lens' focus distance) for this reason.

Early video taps (which showed a video image of the viewing system’s ground glass) let everybody see the same useless image. Video taps improved, of course, but even with a good video image of the viewfinder, you still couldn’t see the movie; film emulsions “see” differently than a person does, interpreting the image and thus the story.

Because they couldn’t actually see what they were filming, early filmmakers had to create the movie in their minds, using, among other talents, their skill with lenses and film stocks. The part of the mind used for this sort of thing is the imaginative part, the part that you dream with or remember your grandmother. Cinema was invented during this time.

Video comes from TV, where what you see is more or less what you get. Video makers created the video on monitors: this goes there; this moves from this part of the picture to that part of the picture. The part of the mind used for this sort of thing is the pattern recognition part, the part you use to find a lost contact lens. Video was invented during this time.

Film and video were different for the audience, too. In a movie theater, a film projector shows 48 images a second (each film frame is shown twice) interspersed with 48 black frames a second. This means that half the time, when you are watching a film print (if you can still find one), you are looking at a black screen. You must fill in the black frames of the story with your mind: how his hand got from there to there, what he was thinking during that flicker in his eyes, where the bullet went. The audience uses the same imaginative part of their minds to watch the movie that the filmmakers used to create it.

On video monitors, there are no black frames: each image is followed by the next, answering all questions, describing the image for you. No audience participation in the storytelling is required.

Movies made in a filmmaker’s mind and videos made on a monitor tend to tell stories differently.

Movies often have upstage and downstage entrances, while, in videos, characters tend to enter from stage left or right.

In part because film camera systems had less depth of field than video camera systems, but also because of mind vs. monitor filmmaking, movies tend to have deeper planes of space. Videos tend to have shallow planes of space.

Because of the large size and resolution of film displays as opposed to the small size and resolution of video displays, but also because the scale of the mind is far greater than the scale of a monitor, movies tend to have larger shots held longer so that you can see them whereas videos tend to have closer shots cut faster.

Movies tend to have greater color depth and palette than videos for the same reasons.

The mind is multidimensional (x, y, z, time, memory, hope, regret…), while monitors are stubbornly 2D. The stories created with each tend to adjust accordingly.

Technology has changed: Film and Video had a child, and its name is Digital. We’ve got big imagers, small imagers, high-resolution displays, digital projection in movie theaters, RAW, LUTS, HDR and HFR. We’ve got people trying to pull focus on still photo lenses with cheap follow focuses. At every step of production and post-production, armies of people with computers can touch the image and have their way with it. Some of the viewfinders are very sharp indeed. Everyone has his or her eyes glued to the monitor.

Because the technology that we use to make movies has changed, with monitors at the center of each filmmaking activity, movies have changed: they are more like videos.

More 2D, with thinner stories; less meaningful (even, and maybe especially, 3D movies have 2D stories). Everything is compressed to fit into the tiny bandwidth of the monitors used by the filmmakers.

An empty video village. This is how it ought to be most of the time.

This is terrible for the poor actors, by the way: an actor wants a human interaction, a feedback signal, some connection with the Director after finishing a take. So, he or she looks up after hearing a muffled “cut!” only to see a circumspect camera operator and maybe the Director’s butt sticking out of the video village tent. Performances tend to adjust accordingly.

However, even though technology has changed a lot, filmmaking hasn’t changed at all: people still have to imagine the story into existence.

Some filmmakers can make cinematic movies on monitors. I suspect that these people have learned to rely less on the monitor and more on their minds and human interactions to create the movie. They resist the temptation the monitor offers to be lazy and cut corners, and inspire their team to do the same. Given the current obsession with gear, this is a pretty astounding feat.

The central part of a director or DP’s job is to artfully, gently (and sometimes firmly) lead the rest of the team to tell the story as movingly, as cinematically as possible. The monitor is often this person’s chief antagonist, a seditious malcontent bent on turning the movie into a TV show.

I’ve learned to hold my friends (the team) close and my enemies (the monitors) closer. I’m working hard to be a guy who can make cinematic movies using a monitor. And, even though the damn thing is like a ball and chain (try nipping across the street to catch a shot when the camera’s attached to an essential umbilical cord), I’ve learned to stop worrying and love the wires.

Here’s some tips for shooting cinematic movies using monitors:

Block. Light. Rehearse. Shoot.
The Holy Quadrinity, the best practice for filmmaking, well established 100 years ago and never bettered. Ignore the camera when blocking: there aren’t shots yet, only the actors and Director telling stories. The DP and Director design shots thereafter. Ignore the monitor most of the time when lighting, This is the more creative portion of the process: use your mind for that. By the time it gets to the camera rehearsal, the story has been mostly created; use the monitor as a tool for adjustments.

Look with your eyes first.
Stand near the camera and look at the set, the lighting, the actors, the story unfolding. Use your understanding of cinema and your imagination to make the movie. This goes for the Director and the DP, who have more access to the camera, but also, as much as is possible, the DIT, Gaffer, Grip, Art, Props, etc.

Look at the monitor after the creative work is done.
What is left is tweaking: cables are in the shot, spill from a lamp, etc.

Show the monitor to everyone.
Hearing a voice call from the video village tent “ok, um, move the flag to your left…” just fetishises the monitor and gives it undue mystery. During the tweaking phase, I try to have a big monitor pointed at the set so that Art, Grip, Electric, etc. can do their own adjustments while looking at it.

Hire a crew that you trust.
Communicate what you are trying to do, move them with the specific things that are important to you, and let them get to it. Then you don’t have to stare at the monitor, constantly keeping tabs on them.

Place the monitors in places where they don’t have to be moved much.
This minimizes their impediment to new set ups. Wheels are good.

Get a DIT
(Digitial Imaging Technician); he or she will watch the monitors (picture, wave form, etc.), taking care of problems so that you don’t have to.

Want to move so fast that you blur? Try ignoring the monitor until the camera rehearsal.

One problem with monitors is that they slow filmmaking down to a crawl: the constant checking of the monitor to see if everyone has obeyed its 2D demands, the consensual decision making, the moving it around at each set up, the watching playback. Meanwhile, money is going up in smoke and the day is getting very long. Want to save money making a movie? All of these monitoring tips speed things up and improve efficiency. Think a good crew is expensive? Try a lame crew (and fixing it in post and possibly displeasing your client with the results). The savings from temperate monitor use will help pay for a better crew.

Yes, this requires skilled people. Yes, it requires faith in them. It requires a lot of the entire team: to create a movie in their imaginations, to minimize and handle the technicalities, relax and enjoy filmmaking. But the rewards are better movies that move people. Plus, it is a lot more fun making them.

Don Starnes directs and photographs movies and videos of all kinds and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He owns seven monitors.